Individuals with viral infection could possibly emit an infectious aerosol. The distinction between exhaled breaths of infected and healthy individuals should facilitate an understanding of the airborne transmission of infections. In this context, the present study is aimed at distinguishing healthy individuals from symptomatic ones by the study of their exhaled breath. A setup composed of a modified hood connected to an electrical low pressure impactor, which allows for the study of a wide range of particle sizes (from 7 nm to 10 lm), has been developed in order to collect exhaled breaths. This setup has been used with seventy eight volunteers. The results obtained There was not a specific size distribution obtained for the individuals with symptoms. As a consequence, further research on the exhaled breath should be undertaken with symptomatic volunteers and would require the analysis of this wide range of particle sizes.

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The microbial content of air has as yet been little described, despite its public health implications, and there remains a lack of environmental microbial data on airborne microflora in enclosed spaces. In this context, the aim of this study was to characterize the diversity and dynamics of airborne microorganisms in the Louvre Museum using high-throughput molecular tools and to underline the microbial signature of indoor air in this human-occupied environment. This microbial community was monitored for 6 month during occupied time. The quantitative results revealed variations in the concentrations of less than one logarithm, with average values of 10(3) and 10(4) Escherichia coli/Aspergillus fumigatus genome equivalent per m(3) for bacteria and fungi, respectively. Our observations highlight the stability of the indoor airborne bacterial diversity over time, while the corresponding eukaryote community was less stable. Bacterial diversity characterized by pyrosequencing 454 showed high diversity dominated by the Proteobacteria which represented 51.1%, 46.9%, and 38.4% of sequences, for each of the three air samples sequenced. A common bacterial diversity was underlined, corresponding to 58.4% of the sequences. The core species were belonging mostly to the Proteobacteria and Actinobacteria, and to the genus Paracoccus spp., Acinetobacter sp., Pseudomonas sp., Enhydrobacter sp., Sphingomonas sp., Staphylococcus sp., and Streptococcus sp.

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